Chrome Frame

There has been a lot of talk lately about Chrome Frame, an Internet Explorer plugin from Google that makes it possible to run webpages in IE using Google Chrome’s rendering engine. It works by looking for a meta tag in the HTML of the webpage that tells the plugin to switch IE’s rendering engine. Hypothetically this is supposed to make it possible for developers to code for the Gecko and WebKit rendering engines, and ignore Internet Explorer altogether.

In practice, I’ve found this (unfortunately) to not be the case. I’ve tried Chrome Frame on several of my websites, including the Fake Name Generator, and have found that they look good in IE8 and Google Chrome, but not IE8 with Chrome Frame.

In addition to things looking weird with Chrome Frame, there is also a very noticeable lag when loading pages that utilize the WebKit rendering engine. My guess is this delay is added because IE has to switch rendering engines and isn’t something inherently wrong with WebKit, but nevertheless it makes for an unpleasant browsing experience.

I think Google’s YouTube team’s idea is better: tell people with crappy browsers to upgrade if they want to take full advantage of a site’s features.